


The Confluence of Bliss and Torment

by willowbilly



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Autism Spectrum, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Codependency, Deep Philosophical Feelings, Developing Relationship, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Introspection, Kinda, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Mental Health Issues, Mercy Killing, Moral Ambiguity, Murder Husbands, Neurodiversity, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Finale, Pretentious, Psychological Horror, Purple Prose, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Hatred, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Underage Drinking, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-07-25 19:29:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7545076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wool of Hannibal's sweater is still damp and slightly prickly, his body radiating warmth beneath Will's hand, solid and real, smooth and firm of form. He may seem carved of ash and stone but as with anyone he is truly flesh and blood and bone. Human. Breakable, perhaps.</p><p><em>Can't live with him. Can't live without him,</em> Bedelia had said, and Will had known then that she was right. She's still right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

The quaintly old-fashioned cross handles of his kitchen sink's chrome faucet shine pristine in the warm morning sunlight coming in through his eastward windows before they are smudged by the sweaty scrabbling of his shaking hands, all of the appliances spotlessly clean as there is no reason to dirty them by throwing together slipshod bachelor's meals for himself when Hannibal's dinner table is made so freely open to him, his cultured hospitality with all its overbearing Gothic pageantry and luxuriously sumptuous spreads. Being invited into Hannibal's space to share in the joys of his culinary expertise, and, most vitally, to be gifted the peculiar comfort of his company, his infallibly steady support, has become... reliable. Flattering, if Will was being honest with himself, or at least it was once Hannibal had managed to so deftly and inexplicably breach Will's barriers, navigating unscathed through his myriad walls of riotous thorns.

Hannibal was perhaps the person Will trusted most in the world, and he did not know when it had become so, when Hannibal's insidious presence had grown so integral to everything of himself, as base and inalienable as his very atoms.

The faucet spout stands tall before drooping in a broad curve to aim straight downward in a gracefully doleful arc, like the stem of a shy forest flower but for its sturdiness, the lukewarm water which gushes forth an unbroken stream made foamy white with bubbling air that tricks him into swallowing less liquid with each mouthful which chases the pill, scooping out hissing handfuls from the slender stalactite of rushing water and messily sucking the shallow pools from his cupped palms before they have a chance to settle into clearness. Nausea is like a lance of light piercing the billowing fog of his confused mind, discomfort, as usual, the only clarity.

Disease. Dis-ease. Will's natural state.

There's a hornet's nest which has made a home in his stomach and he's just been sucker punched, so he expects it when the tangy saliva floods his mouth, coming over the back of his tongue in a distinctively tasting tide as his entire digestive tract seizes and spasms, expects the helpless, instinctive retching and the bitter burn of bile. He bends over the sink, the wobbly architecture of his hunched spine a creaking arch set to collapse at any moment, bolstered only by his trembling arms, his elbows slipping from side to side on his counter for purchase, his flesh and tendons squirming too loose around the framework of his bones and too tight within the confines of his skin.

He chokes as the object travels reluctantly up his throat, a rubbery flap pressing out against the walls of his esophagus before he finally expels it with a hacking grumble that vibrates in his chest, the extra bit of frantic force from his voice sending the thing flying out. When it's in his mouth he almost closes his teeth on it, reflexively wanting to grind them in disgust, to chew the flat, raw, fold-embellished bit of cartilage into something pulpy and unrecognizable which he can make disappear again with a gulp, something he can destroy, can get _off of his tongue,_ but before he can bite down his revulsion has already made him spit it, fast and clumsy, into the sink. It's pasty and coated in mucus, touched by vivid, bloodless pink on the severed side, unassumingly small and so astoundingly horrific as to be initially unrecognizable to him. Because this is impossible. Impossible.

It is a human ear.

* * *

 

He could recognize bits of himself in his father, physical attributes he'd inherited. There were differences among the similarities; his father's build was broader and heavier, his hair curlier, grizzled, and kept shorn short in the crew cut he'd sported since his days in the Navy. But there were things which seemed lifted almost straight from one body to the other; the geometry of the jaw, the flare of the nostrils, the intelligent brow constantly marred by lines of concentration or consternation, and haunted eyes of an ordinary, indeterminate blue faintly tinged with gray and pale hazel, eyes which took on some of the dark of whatever they looked at, dead and tainted in their brushed steel sheen. Graham senior's eyes darkened to a sunlit storm retreating beyond the horizon whenever he gazed at his son, his brow furrowing in that familiar way as though he could not make sense of what he saw, as though they were strangers yet and he was somehow surprised to find a son waiting expectantly before him.

Will was always good at piecing the whole together from scattered fragments. A lot of it was probably his memory. He'd looked it up once and found the word to be _eidetiker,_ German in origin: a person able to recall images with extreme realism, precision, and stability, whose mental images are externally projected, or experienced as separate from oneself, outside of one's head. Often used interchangeably and incorrectly with “photographic memory.”

He wonders sometimes, if he dug down deep enough, into the recesses of his childhood, he'd be able to find the moment at which he began to remember. He could call up the events, playing them like preciously preserved reels of historically insignificant film, see his small hands and legs, the large furniture, the ceilings and trees so high, the sky the same endless upside-down abyss, but there was no particular one which seemed as though it were the genesis, the special point at which his nascence became his inception, and their emotional immediacy had faded over time, leaving them hollow distractions. Just a jumble of irrelevant memories, warped by a child's narrow discernment, outgrown like keepsakes tucked away in a dusty shoe box on the top shelf of a hall closet, stale mothballs and lavender, clothes which no longer fit. If he were to forget them they would not be worth missing. But then, if he'd forgotten them, he would never be able to know if he'd miss them after all.

Most experiences are ephemeral, passing into one's mind and lingering only so long as they are necessary. Before the hippocampus matures at around three years of age, conscious memories are restricted almost completely to the constantly refreshed and updated loop of working memory which serves for day-to-day learning and functioning but which fails to generate one's autobiographical or “episodic” memory, one's narrative recollections, the lasting impressions which stretch out into one's past like footprints in the wake of one's travels.

The formation of episodic memory relies on perception, composed of various external sensory input which combine in the association areas of the brain, and the input must in turn be intense enough, novel enough, or carry with it strong enough emotional impact that the event attracts attention, which causes more neurons to fire and increases the likelihood that it will be processed further and encoded by the hippocampus. While the hippocampus is essential to long-term retention, the cortical areas which first processed the sensations maintain the unique patterns of neurons which fired at the time of internalization, individual components of the whole stored where they were first created, and when the memory is accessed through the hippocampus the neuron patterns fire again. Repeated synchronous firing increases the neurons' inclinations to fire again in the same pattern in the future, consolidating the memory through potentiation.

Thus the unique web of any given memory is held throughout the brain, waiting only to be activated, and whenever one remembers, one is not only solidifying its existence but _reliving_ it.

Other eidetikers apparently rarely, if ever, mistake their mental imagery for objective reality. They'd be insane if they did, right?

The swift wave of painstakingly detailed imagination sweeping before him to interpose itself between his mind and its cognizance of the corporeal, subjectivity reigning supreme. He closes his eyes and everything is held outside of himself... a hollow shell left behind, waiting for constructions of killers' psyches to step within and wear him like a suit into the landscape projected for them, made for them, the fluid interaction of past and present where emotion and the motive it imparts is the only reality. He is merely a conduit, a vessel. His sense of self transforming within him, a grotesque mirror reflecting the twisted, the terrible, the quintessential, ugly _humanness_ of inhumanity, the imprints of alien personalities lingering long after he comes back to himself, ghosts haunting the wretched gray matter stuffed within his skull, the “bone arena” around which canters the profiling profession's most prized one-trick pony. His eyes, of clear but muted shade, taking the dark of whatever he sees into himself and making it his own.

 _Insane._ Mid sixteenth century. Latin _insanus,_ from _sanus,_ “well, healthy, of sound mind,” and _in,_ meaning... simply... _"not."_

He laughed aloud at the bluntness in his high school Latin class and had to bury his face in his arms, curling down to breathe against the cool, chipped varnish of the desk when everyone turned to look at the boy so shy he never spoke when he could help it and gave curt one-word responses when he couldn't, the odd boy who avoided eye contact and turned a cold shoulder until their curiosity had faded and he'd slipped from their minds, a shadow, fleeting. Now their gazes were a barrage raking over him like claws scrabbling for purchase, seeking entrance, the teacher growing worried at his unresponsiveness, someone snickering off to the side. He lifted his head, murmured an apology without an accompanying explanation, and picked up his yellow 2B pencil, the eraser on the end still long and squared-off and soft coral-pink above the aluminum ferrule, the brand insignia a dark, slick script of slender italicized print pressed tiny and crisp into one flat side. The class resumed its work.

* * *

 

_"What's happening to me?”_

He is sweating, shaking, having some sort of fit. He is coming apart, a patchwork man with fraying edges finally unraveling at the seams, thread by thrumming thread, molecule by buzzing molecule, sobbing and helpless and as fundamentally frightened as if he were suspended over the black, bellowing pit of hell, his tendons seizing like discordantly plucked piano wires, fingernails straining to be free of their beds, eyes rolling inadvertently and inexorably upwards in his sockets like a supplication to the omniscient and uncaring God who may or may not exist beyond the shadowed ceiling of Hannibal's dining room, or perhaps in supplication not to some distant, hypothetical deity, but to the devil who stands fast at his side, who says his name and is telling him to be calm in a voice like the primordial rise and fall of the sea.

And Will drowns.

* * *

 

“Were you trying to drown us, Will?”

Will breathes. The sand is cold and pervasively gritty, the grains cemented together over the waterline into a shallow incline, a slab-like plane which is loathe to accommodate the bony sprawl of a living, shivering body whose angles nevertheless seek to burrow downward and make space for itself until it finds the soft within the hard, but the sand is still so much warmer than the water was with its chaos of white-capped waves, colossal, unforgiving protrusions of stones rising up from the foam like the ragged black teeth of a leviathan's ravenous maw. There's a shy and gentle heat tingling at his extremities in counterpoint to the throbbing fire of his injuries, soothing his trembling and luring him into sleepiness, hypothermia a more effective siren call than that of the ocean's crushing depths.

“Not drown. I thought the fall would do it for sure,” he replies, muttering through a throat sore from coughing up seawater, words reluctantly shaped around the horrific knife wound in his cheek which stings and bleeds and through which he can taste a thin flow of briny air seeping in through the gummy gash.

When he opens his eyes he sees Hannibal's indistinguishably dark silhouette crouched over him. One palm rests over Will's sternum as though he'd been prepared to perform CPR. People do not magically get better from CPR; it is not a cure but a stopgap measure in lieu of proper medical intervention. If Will's lungs had indeed filled and his heart had stopped Hannibal would have had to slave over his body, keep it breathing, keep its heart beating, until emergency personnel arrived to more permanently resuscitate and then stabilize him. Presuming they were to come in the first place.

Will wonders if Hannibal would have done so, or if he would have shrugged at the course of things, mourned him, cut out his waterlogged lungs and his tough, gamy heart to eat them raw in the cool gray moonlight, if he would have been left with nothing but the memory of Will's becoming to treasure, that ruthless, crystalline moment of synchronicity of purpose and liberated violence as together they brought the Dragon down, that moment which already seems so long ago and far away, though Will can feel the fact of it, its unflinching truth, its rightness and remorselessness, lodged into his soul. A paradigm shift, as though the magnetic directions on his moral compass have spun from alignment, north now lost to him forever as the needle twirls 'round and 'round in its newfound freedom, the willy-nilly whirling dance of the adrift.

“Oh, Will,” Hannibal says, husky and fond. His sopping bangs drip a line of water onto Will's forehead, along what Will knows to be the flat, faded scar from the bone saw wielded by Hannibal's steady doctor's hands, backed by his psychopath's nerves, driven by his unfathomable love. Far above, the night sky is misted with clouds, semi-opaque sheets and ripples illuminated by the moon, through which stars can just be glimpsed, glimmering faintly here and there. Hannibal's form is like a cutout so dense it is in itself a hole in the fabric of space, and Will feels as though he could fall upwards and into him, be swallowed whole, gravity powerless against the incontrovertible attraction of Hannibal: an alternate law of the universe.

He resists the urge to start humming _Space Oddity._ It isn't as though Hannibal would suddenly think him crazy, or, well, think him any crazier than he actually is already, but still. It seems as though they're having a moment.

“I'm freezing my ass off,” he says instead, with utmost tact and foremost relevancy.

Hannibal pats Will's chest, his hand warm through Will's wet shirt and his head ducking down in a way that makes Will believe him to be laughing silently, his mood infernally upbeat even after the all-around rough evening they've endured. “Well then,” Hannibal says in a practical tone, dry as desert wind, “we must arise and tend to ourselves before your ass freezes any further.” He sounds as composed as ever, the bastard, though his shoulders are still hitching slightly, almost imperceptibly. It could be the cold, yet Will knows that his own offbeat brand of rudeness is the only kind that Hannibal has ever even tolerated, much less found amusing, and that it is not, in fact, the temperature which makes a man of Hannibal's self-control tremble.

Despite the harsh flare of pain and iron-rich gush of blood which the action draws from his stab wound as his numb cheek muscles contract, pulling upwards, Will finds his mouth stretching into a smile.

* * *

 

Will thinks his father is worried for him because Will does not speak yet. He can walk and even run on his own, faster than he ever could before, he can put on his own clothes and draw his signature in big, stick-like letters and he does not throw tantrums anymore, but he only stares when people lean in towards his face with their smiles so wide, with their crooning voices pitching higher with encouraging, condescending cheer, and he turns to hide his face in his father's shoulder because he does not like how he can feel his expression morphing to mirror theirs, how there is an itch on the inside of his head which calls for indulgence when confronted by another's eyes, compelling him to echo that which is there. When they laugh at his apparent shyness, finding it endearing, he can only find it within himself to release his tears of confusion when his face is hidden and his head feels a little more his own, but he can still see them, right in front of him, even with his eyes squeezed shut, even in the pitch dark, hours afterwards.

Things still exist before him even when the moments in which he saw them have passed, forestalling the mysterious emergence of language, making extraneous the structure which yearns to wind its way through his already oddly accurate perceptions, but he cannot communicate this because the words which drift just a little beyond his reach are _words_ and not _images,_ and they are not so reliable as to come to him upon command as visual memories do. He cannot project himself upon the world, only... accept all of that which is there.

Will is precocious... at least, that's what is said when they dance around the subject of his speech, or lack thereof, the way that he stumbles in social situations, freezes in disorientation. He is a very smart, bright little boy, they say, besides... well, besides _that_.

When confronted with his muteness they act as though he's deaf and let their tongues wag more freely than they would have anyways, chatting as they are over the head of a child. They don't think he can tell that when they say _that,_ they just mean the rest of him. Will is missing bits, connections, or perhaps he has too many all tangled together, all his wires crossed, and he senses it in every interaction in which he takes part. He never knows quite what to do, is easily overwhelmed. He sees other adults give his father looks of pity behind his back, and can feel himself become pitying in turn to his father's face because he has not yet learned how to keep himself closed off, insulated within isolation.

Guilelessly curious, he watches the adults and knows what it is like to be tall, to drive a car, to walk in high heels or wear a tie, to find things smaller than himself cute and dumb, to have a reservoir of intelligence and experience which seems to him so great as to be without depth, so far is it beyond his comprehension, so complex and vast and strange. He watches infants, and knows what it is like to be without even his own clumsy coordination, without even rudimentary higher thought, what it is like to be cared for so wholly and loved so fully. He watches children his own age and cannot keep looking when they watch him back, so intense is the sense of displacement, of similarities so striking as to overwhelm differences so drastic. He watches others, and he knows them as himself. And in doing so, he, perforce, does not know himself.

They'll ask him sometimes. Other kids. “What's your name?” And he cannot be sure of what it must be.

His father takes him to a room where they sit on chairs lined up along the wall. It feels like a softer version of a doctor's office. His father had called ahead to make an appointment and was frustrated on the way there, saying, “We're late,” over and over, his hands fumbling with the buckles of Will's booster seat, slamming the old truck door hard enough for Will to flinch at the metallic shriek and the wall of sound hitting his eardrum, for flakes of rust to fall, and then his father's fingers were tight on the wheel, knuckles white as the tires squealed. Will flexed his own hands to ease the tension but it did not help.

Now they sit, waiting, his father not reaching for any of the bright and shiny magazines all in a stack on a side table, instead drooping, cradling his head in his hands. There's a corner with children's toys, some books, but Will would rather sit by his father, swinging his legs because his feet do not touch the ground. Generic, twangy country music crackles from a radio on a little table, underneath a lamp, and the walls are the blue of the sky, the ceiling the color of vanilla ice cream, the carpet on the floor thin and gray like lint. There is a clock ticking away somewhere, but even when Will finds it, hanging high, roman numerals marching around its circumference in bold black, he does not know how long it has been. He cannot read the time, does not quite remember which is the hour hand and which the minute, and he does not care, anyways. His father sits still and patient, and so he does as well.

When finally they are asked to come into another room Will is lifted onto a chair across from a woman who thanks them for coming in and asks his father if this is “young Will,” with one of those broad smiles which adults give to children like a reassurance, a promise not to hurt. There is fatigue in her limbs, pinching around her eyelids, dragging her down a little, things Will thinks his father does not notice as he does, things nobody notices as he does. She hasn't slept well and she just wants to go home.

Will wants to go home, too, so he can relate.

Sometimes she tries to coax Will into talking, smiling the wide smile which makes her cheeks hurt but which displays the set of unnaturally straight, white teeth of which she is very vain of, and all three of them listen to the silence swell in the room like an oppressive fourth presence. Mostly, though, she asks Will's father a lot of questions, and writes down the answers with a cheap pen, nodding and making sounds of acknowledgment and shooting Will measuring, skeptical glances from the corner of her eye. He can tell when she does it, every time, even though he's fixed his gaze on the floor for so long that his sight sways in and out of focus in little dips as darkness puffs around the edges, but she always pretends it hasn't happened, goes back to her questions and her writing. He can tell when she stops listening to the answers his father gives her.

She administers a few tests which she tries to make Will believe are games, and then some more scribbling with her plastic clicky pen, and then she tells Will's father her preliminary diagnosis. She says words like “developmental difficulties,” and “seems a very simple case,” and she's already dismissive, twitching towards the big magenta handbag stowed under her desk, privately eager to be out the door, but Will's father shakes his head, nonplussed, increasingly indignant, says his son “isn't a simpleton,” says she's so far off the mark she may as well be on the moon. She repeats “autism,” and “impairment,” and Will's father raises his voice and says that she doesn't understand, that Will is just the opposite.

Will quietly slips from his chair and walks out of the office, finds his way back down the short hall to the blue-cream-gray waiting room, hoists himself into the same seat he'd picked earlier, next to the low, little table with the magazines and the fuzzy radio station and the lamp with its cone of warm yellow light, and kicks his legs in time with the clock's ticking until his father and the woman emerge, not talking to each other anymore, but not arguing either.

His father walks towards him in big, swift strides and bends down to hug him, Will's cheek finding the shelf of his father's hard, thick shoulder with the ease of long practice. He tucks his face close beneath his father's chin, against the scrape of his stubble and into the sweat-humid space up near the corded pillar of his throat, one of his hands huge and calloused as it spans the back of Will's skull and presses down his unkempt curls, the other rubbing a circle over Will's narrow back before bearing him effortlessly up against his barrel chest, Will's head bumping against his father's jaw before he settles. He breathes in the smell of the dirty denim jacket, motor oil and metal and sea spray, and closes his eyes.

He imagines walking on the moon, body floating buoyantly with every slow-motion step taken in the airless vacuum, tethered by a more tenuous force of gravity that is more easily escaped, a pale, pitted, dusty plain of static emptiness curving away from his feet, the earth hanging distant and blue-green-white-tan against the black abyss beyond, a sphere of colors so bright and fractal-patterned and far away enough that nothing of it cannot ever touch him.

“I'm tired,” he whispers, a thin, whining exhalation of air, and feels his father's surprise in the expansion of his chest, his aimless regret in the way his fingers hesitate in Will's hair before resuming their stroking.

“I know, bud,” he says. “I'm sorry. I know.”

They go home.

* * *

 

There is nothing of the pink in Hannibal, nothing of the softness of common humanity. The impeccably trimmed, slick sweep of his hair is a dark ash brown succumbing to metallic streaks of bronzy grey, the skin molded to the high, unforgiving architecture of his sculpted physiognomy a pale brown too rich to be called sallow, a natural tan not born of the sun, which, along with the stillness and subtlety of his affect, makes the sharp angles and fine crags of his face seem hewn from stone, a harsh, weathered beauty so strong and so odd it almost verges on the crude, like the bare, looming alpine peaks where the eagles nest. The hunter's bow of his upper lip overhangs somewhat over the lower, dipping to a faint, sharp point, and both lips are hard and red, not pink, slashes of dusky ruddiness behind which predator's teeth and a beguiler's voice lie in wait. The fine capillaries in the creamy whites of his eyes are also red, sparse, lacy traceries of translucent scarlet wreathed around dark brown irises, and even the tiny, pulpy beads of tissue visible in the inner corners of his eyes seem nothing less than a watered-down crimson.

He is closer to the primal, to the gloriously, unselfconsciously savage, to the blood which beats in the ancient rhythm of life and death, even within his exquisite, stony shell of cultured grace and the discriminatingly fine palate with which he pickily indulges his hedonistic tastes. His high intelligence only meshes perfectly with his base desires, complementary to the point of inseparability. A symbiosis which utterly bypasses the tame and the mediocre in all its tedious forms and fashions. He is transcendent.

Not that Will's ever going to tell him that. His ego is already big enough; full, plump and magnificent as a spoiled, glossy goose meant for the holiday dinner table. An ironic sort of simile, but oh, how it fits the man, the serial killer, who _eats_ his human victims, whose given name, ludicrously apropos, rhymes with “cannibal.” With _cannibal_ _,_ for God's sake.

And Will realizes that his thoughts are treacherously close to flippant, to fond, treacherously close to how he would view the man he'd thought to be his friend, before he found one of the monsters who'd haunted his dreams to have been lurking behind a familiar face, there all along, and he suppresses a surge of _hatred_ only so much so that it does not show too clearly in his expression. In this cage for the violent, the broken, the hopelessly _wrong_ minds in which he has found himself, any emotions are weaknesses to be exploited, blood spoor for the hungry to follow, and Hannibal's deadly eyes are gleaming with interest and silent, immeasurable pride through the steel bars which separate him from the dank, rough-walled box of Will's prison cell. Will hates and hates and _hates_ , and he wonders: _How did I not see?_

For he is the gifted one, the reclusive near-mystic, the touchy, brilliant main character of every crime series on television which bases itself more on lurid psychological gibberish, on angst and horror, than on forensic science, unparalleled in his insight, in _sight,_ and yet he had been so _blind._ He had allowed his eyes to be bound by a veil of trust. In his wretched vulnerability he had reached out into the shadows of another, into the _other,_ into the dark of the unknown, hoping for someone to reach back and hold his hand. He had needed... he had _wanted..._

And, well. Just look at what reached back.

 _What a fool I am,_ he thinks. _What a fool._

* * *

 

Will's mother must have left sometime before his third birthday. He knows this because he does not remember her: a simple matter of brain development.

Will's father never talks of her except to say that she did not die but left of her own will, that it was her own decision to make and that they should not resent her for it. He never says whether she left because of Will, and Will does not ask.

* * *

 

He dreams of the fall. It had seemed so endless at the time, an interminable plummet with the wind an insubstantial cushion buffeting them and flooding through his blood-soaked clothes to batter straight into, straight through, his body, the dark line of the horizon where it wedded the sea tilting to point upright, the cliff a rough wall rushing so close that he could have reached out and snapped his fingers against its sheer face had he reached for it. He wonders if it would have stripped the skin before the pressure granted by the blackened-lightning speed of their descent broke bones like brittle twigs, like afterthoughts. It felt like floating more than falling, locked in an embrace which kept them tenderly together even as Will, almost without conscious volition, moved them over the precipice so that the implacable call of the earth's core could pull them oh so gently downward towards its seething, stormy breast.

There were no thoughts, no regrets to mull over, and no fear. It was an instant in which an eternity lived, where there was nothing other than the immortality granted by existing only within the moment, when one's being is so complete that it is boundless, that in helplessness one finds omnipotence.

Hannibal had allowed himself to lose his balance, had gone pliant and accepting in Will's arms. That is what Will remembers most: how Hannibal did not try to shove him away, and how his hands did not scrabble for purchase, did not tighten in panic around Will's shoulders. All that had mattered for him was the space they formed between them, the touch of Will's body against his own, the attuned oneness of contact beyond the physical, the soul-meld of _belonging._ Will had breathed in as he turned on his feet, leaning enough to find himself lifting off them, and the fall downward hadn't lasted longer than its exhalation, relaxed and warm against Hannibal's scarlet-mottled sweater.

Hitting the water felt disconnected entirely, as though they ripped through one dimension and into another with an icy shock, the all-encompassing cold and the unforgiving slam of impact registering before the wet did. And then there was the taste of ancient, current-circulated, dead-mineral salt washing out the lingering blood-heat flavor of life's death in his mouth, burning up his nasal cavities and stinging the orbs of his eyes, occluding his ears with merciless screaming silence and blasting excruciatingly into all the bits of him left exposed and mangled from a madman's knife. He'd thought it was the end for them. A closing of the book. A final, inescapable solution, to which he surrendered, his mind going finally, blessedly blank.

And then they were on the beach.

Will cracks open his eyes and blearily watches the road through the windshield, an eager blur of dreary tarmac throwing itself under the tires of their stolen car like an impossible river flowing beneath a stone-still craft, the headlights bright enough to kill the moonglow beyond into hazy blackness, the fat yellow dashes down the center bleeding into one another until they seem an indistinguishable smear. The ocean glints occasionally, far beyond and below, an expanse which feels more like an absence lurking around the swoops and curves of the road which sweep them onward than the enormous elemental entity which had so recently engulfed them.

He slides his eyes sideways, rolls his head after them, and gazes at Hannibal where he is reclining in the driver's seat, lit dimly by the dashboard displays. He looks haggard, all makeshift bandages, browning bloodstains, and hair hanging lank and brittle with dried seawater where it categorically refuses to be pushed neatly off his forehead, but despite his evident pain and exhaustion there is a lightness to him, a free-and-easy blitheness born of some manner of peace. He smiles when Will turns to consider him, a delicate network of wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes, his irises nearly black in the dark and unmoving from their task as the broad, severe contours of his mouth twist faintly upwards above the strong curl of his chin.

The nobility of his high forehead is undermined by a hint of brutishness in the form of a slight beetle-brow with a sympathetic sort of slope, which is in turn balanced by his prominent cheekbones and fine, patrician nose, his eyebrows practically nonexistent over the deep-set crescents of his well-defined upper lids. There is an inherently shadowed quality to his eyes, an opacity, a cold-blooded deliberation in the measure of his blinking. Will used to see only the patience and the wisdom, was put at ease by how self-contained Hannibal's presence was, how little Hannibal's emotions intruded on his own, but for a while now he's seen the calculation, the detachment and the whimsical sadism. He sees the hollow thing behind the meticulous disguise. Will is able to know himself so fully around Hannibal because Will is a mirror, and Hannibal has almost nothing within him for Will to reflect. Nothing so easily, so humanly, touchable.

He is one of the few enigmas Will has ever encountered, and though he cannot shape himself in Hannibal's image, he finds it so incredibly effortless, so alluring, to become lost within his depths. After everything there is still a comfort to be found there.

“I tried to kill us,” Will murmurs, and he is not sure whether he imagined speaking or actually uttered it aloud until Hannibal answers.

“And now I shall endeavor to save us.” That is all Hannibal bothers to say in matter-of-fact reply over the sedate growl of the engine, and he still sounds so inexplicably affectionate and blasé, his deep voice more thickly accented than usual, vowels rounded, almost slurring at points. Will reaches out with his left arm, the nearest, and hovers over the side of Hannibal's face, skimming his fingertips along his hairline, around the edge of his ear and down his neck, before settling on his shoulder. The wool is still damp and slightly prickly, Hannibal radiating warmth beneath, solid and real, smooth and firm of form. He may seem carved of ash and stone but as with anyone he is truly flesh and blood and bone. Human. Breakable, perhaps.

 _Can't live with him. Can't live without him,_ Bedelia had said, and Will had known then that she was right. She's still right.

Hannibal takes his right hand from the wheel and folds it over Will's, drawing it within his and bringing it downwards so that their hands both rest on his thigh, loosely entwined. Will studies Hannibal's profile until he cannot keep his eyes open even in a tired squint, and then announces, “I'm going back to sleep.”

“I will wake you when we arrive,” Hannibal says, the timbre of his voice lulling Will into drowsy contentment like spiced honey in hot milk, hiding the taste of poison. He does not specify as to their destination, but it's not like Will cares. He lets his eyes slip shut and still sees Hannibal before him: that's the only thing which matters, really.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

They moved from Louisiana to Mississippi when Will was in ninth grade, going from a trailer to a rickety house riddled with wood rot. Whenever his father wasn't at the boatyard he was working on the house, changing light bulbs, ripping out moldy, cracking tiling in the kitchen and bathroom, fixing up the uneven floorboards, replacing the front porch and coating it with a fresh layer of finish to lock the moisture out. It went on acrid and sticky enough that the bugs were trapped by it, and dried to a dull honeyed glow which made it seem too fine for the shabby house it was attached to. Will took to using the back door, where the porch's wood was dark, musty and splintered, and he was not afraid of scuffing it with the muddy, worn-down treads of his secondhand boots.

His father was neither a carpenter nor plumber, his skills firmly rooted in small engine mechanics, but Will sensed a satisfaction in him at the completion of another domestic project, a sort of nesting instinct. The last house he'd had, he'd shared with Will's mother, and it had been torn from its foundations by Hurricane Camille. Traces of its destruction lingered around their new home, even so far away; vacant lots and old piles of debris, the neighborhood itself thin of neighbors.

Their yard was overgrown with coarse weeds and thick clumps of sharp-edged grass, brushy seed heads swaying with the rare breeze which rustled through the stalks like a whisper, dipping under the weight of grasshoppers which Will would sneak up on, one step at a time so as not to scare them into springing away, until he could draw even to them and study them up close, their beige, textured carapaces and black pinprick eyes, small terrestrial aliens. Butterflies, too, were fascinating to observe; the microscopic scales of iridescent color powdering their proportionally huge wings with all their intricate veins and patterns, their antennae thinner than strands of hair, tipped with tiny bulbs as though dipped in paint, their dainty faces snubbed, fuzzy, and strange, unreadable even to him. It was possible they did not even have minds; that they only existed in the abstract, as a bundle of instinctual impulses distinguishable from the greater whole only in the selfishness of their specificity, an eddy in the stream of nature.

If Will eased up behind them, put out a hand so slowly that his muscles creaked with being held in place, he could urge a butterfly to step onto the tip of his finger, unafraid, so light on its fine, funnily-jointed legs as to be impossible to feel, its flexible proboscis uncurling to tap restlessly between the ridges of Will's skin, searching out the elusive mineral secretions Will supposed were to be found there. Even in this weightless creature there remained dominant an insatiable appetite.

The road in front of the Mississippi house was cracked and pale with age, the concrete path from the sidewalk to the front porch likewise in disrepair, overgrown so that their pant legs are brushed wet with dew in the mornings when they walk out to the pickup parked on the curb, when everything is soft and blue and silent. Will carries his books in his arms, and does not take food with him because he qualifies for the free lunch at school and neither he nor his father are ones to bother themselves with the preparation of an unnecessary meal. They do not talk.

If Will had been a daughter, or if he had, at least, more closely resembled his mother, perhaps then his father would have tried harder to love him. His father had always taken him to work as often as he could because Will had never fared well in the company of strangers... or in the company of anyone, truth be told, and babysitters cost money besides. He wasn't tall enough for his height to reach his father's chest when there was an accident at his father's work, dropped machinery, and two bones in his father's foot were broken. He'd been hobbling in a cast for a couple months, afterwards.

At the time, the moment it took place, Will started to _scream,_ because it _hurt._ He'd seen it happen, he'd seen the weight fall, _felt_ the snap and the wrenching surge of sharp, surprising agony as though it were his own, and he was a young child with a young child's tolerance for pain. While his father swallowed a gasp and muttered curses as the other adults rushed to help him, Will had no such level of composure. He sobbed and howled like a dying dog, curled over his own foot and trying to hold the pain back with the clench of his hands, oblivious to everyone but his father as they heaved the thing off him.

“You sure that's a boy you got there, Ed?” someone ribbed, once they were sure there was no further danger, once Will had quieted into sniffles in his father's arms, his father pressing his son's face into his shoulder to muffle him as much as to calm him. The man uttering the jibe was jealous of Will's father's talent, his unflagging work ethic, had always thought Will himself to be stupid, a nuisance, and the man hid his resentment behind a buddy-buddy veneer of companionship and passed off any opinions which were met with offense as jokes. He was one of Will's father's best friends, though none of his friends were close ones anyways. “Little pecker screams like a girl. There isn't e'en any blood.”

“Fuck you, Lloyd,” Will's father snapped, strained, his face ashen. “Just get me to the clinic, would ya.”

“Sure, sure.”

Will was buckled into the backseat beside Graham senior. He refused to be separated and only ceased to cry when his father received treatment, pain pills in a little white cup of paper which Graham swallowed dry, the lumps lodging in his and Will's throats. That night his father did not tuck him into bed and his open eyes felt swollen and gummy as the dark pressed in on them, the silence smothering in his ears except for the occasional creak of the chair which his father sat awake in, his elbows bumping against the modest dining table in the kitchen as he shifted, the buzz of insects and the calls of night birds outside. He stayed up like that very late into the night.

It was after that incident that Will found his father to be avoiding him, pushing him away when he wasn't absolutely in need of reassurance, when he wasn't already at the point of falling apart. “You're fine,” he'd say to Will. “C'mon, you got to be a man. Just push through it.”

Endless iterations of _Ignore it, be strong, be normal._ All meant for the best. All useless. Fuel for a desolate bemusement, a sense of inborn failure. Will's father was the only one to turn to and he had decided to sever any traces of dependency rather than foster support. It was not intentional cruelty; only the best course of action he knew to take. Will, therefore, did not begrudge him for the distance growing between them.

Sometimes he would reach out towards Will, for his shoulder to steer him somewhere, and then he would stop, drawing away as though he wrongly realized he'd be holding Will back, or Will would find himself proactively flinching away so that he never had to feel the retraction of his father's touch. Usually Graham senior would watch Will when he thought Will wouldn't catch him at it, that frown line appearing between his eyes.

Will was always good at piecing the whole together from scattered fragments, but only so long as they were not his personal life or his sense of belonging, both hopelessly, laughably unsalvageable. He could recognize bits of himself in his father, physical attributes he'd inherited, but _only_ the physical ones. When his father looked at him he saw a stranger, and so that was what Will saw, when he looked back at him. They never talked. Everything between them remained unsaid, would exist in silence until, and even after, the elder Graham went to his grave.

Still. He brought Will to the boatyard throughout his early years rather than sending him to some sterile daycare, and in later weekends and summers Will would climb into the passenger seat, the window rolled down and his head leaning desultorily out into the muggy air to make up for the busted AC. He'd crouch down beside his father before all kinds of crafts, sleek or clunky, old or new, all smelling quintessentially of water, of motion and travel, of sweat and fish and brine. Will followed him across decks and knew how to roll his steps with the rocking of the waves so that he did not stumble, how to tie a knot and repair a crack in a hull, how to tell when the tide was coming in. With the coolness of garage concrete beneath him and the salt and sand of the ocean on his chapped lips, he'd pass his father his tools and watch as his broad brown hands tinkered with the guts of an engine, diagnosing its ills and manipulating its interlocking parts back into a symphony of balance, of soundness and reliability. Eventually his father would hand _him_ a tool, would direct _his_ hands in the motions, wordlessly encouraging him to piece together the puzzle, though Will's hands never grew so large, nor so assured.

Motor oil only looked greasy-dull when smeared on him, smudged over his fingertips and marking out the loops and whorls of his prints as though in preparation for their addition to a criminal record, but it was blackly opalescent when floating as a skin of foreign liquid over the edges of a rain puddle. Pollution; beauty; subjectivity.

Sometimes they'd take a boat out, just the two of them in the crashing quiet, unspeaking, absorbed in task and movement. He taught Will how to read the tides and the currents, how to harness the wind within the billows of a sail. He showed him the delicacies of tying a lure. Of casting it, of coaxing in a fish on the line, the sun dancing white and blinding on the water, shining so bright into his eyes that it seemed to spear through them and all the way into the back of his skull, ruthlessly cleansing, the sky roaring broad and limitless above them and the sea about them, a catch's scales glimmering slick and silver, compressed tensile strength thrashing against his grip, cold against the pliable dryness of his naked mammalian skin, its round, pale eye lit up like glass, lit up with only the most crucial of fundamentals, strung out and pure like the high notes of a flute solo rather than the chaotic crashing of an undisciplined, excessively complicated orchestra. A distillation. Calming in its purity. In its removedness from himself. And Will would experience... something _akin,_ at least, to tranquility.

* * *

 

He wakes as Hannibal is lifting him from the car seat, one arm beneath his knees and the other supporting his shoulders, and rouses enough to keep his head from hanging as a dead weight and putting a crick in his neck, blinking at Hannibal in the morning sunlight, his face screwing itself into a grimace.

Hannibal must have much practice with the relocation of limp bodies, given the more bloody of his hobbies, but Will is still surprised at the fact that Hannibal can find it within himself to carry him. That kind of stamina seems almost superhuman.

 _Monstrous,_ the back of his mind whispers, a hiss like a draft of cold outside air. _He's a monster._

“Let me down,” Will says, as Hannibal strides forward. Hannibal's leaning back a little to compensate for Will's weight, and Hannibal's slightly faltering steps, which are invisible from Will's vantage point, make his stomach lurch in anticipation of balance being lost.

“Nonsense,” Hannibal chides, all lofty, gentlemanly accommodation, as though Will is the one being foolhardy by insisting that he walk to wherever they're going on his own two feet like the adult he is rather than allow an exhausted man to bear the brunt of his own burden.

“You will drop me. Either by accident or because I'm about to _make you.”_

Will sees Hannibal's smile from below, the low angle making the underside of his jaw seem oddly pronounced, and Hannibal himself very tall. “Very well,” Hannibal concedes graciously, and tips Will's legs downward so as to set him gently on his feet, though his other arm remains curled protectively, possessively, around Will's shoulders. Will sways against the shift in gravity as he takes in the deserted neighborhood street littered with fallen leaves and twigs, and almost so completely overhung by arching tree branches that they nearly enmeshed across the middle of the road like a tunnel, the light heavily dappled and faintly emerald, the surging rustle of the leaves blending with the distant whooshing of cars on the main road.

The thinner sticks snap underfoot like old bones as Will follows Hannibal up a driveway to a modest one-story tucked just far enough behind a copse as to be obscured from view from the street. As Hannibal crouches before the garage door to spin the dial of the combination padlock, his slacks rather the worse for wear and their sad state now exacerbated as his knees scrape against the mossy grime of the concrete, Will muses to himself that Hannibal having managed to keep yet another unknown serial killer lair in reserve shouldn't be so surprising. He'd hidden Miriam Lass for how many years, exactly? And Abigail, as well, had been disappeared and made into a ghost in a Baltimore attic, a pale, scared shade of a girl, the sly, stubborn life in her extinguished in silence behind closed doors long before Hannibal had drawn the blade across her throat in a final stroke. Hannibal has a unique talent for bending the laws of existence around himself. Playing with the strings of fate as he pleases.

The garage door shrieks, rusty as it runs, clattering, up the tracks, but Hannibal holds it, keeps it from gaining momentum and slamming up to leave the garage wide open, though he sways doing so, his free arm momentarily coming up across his stomach to palm at his shoddily wrapped bullet wound before dropping again. Will barely has to suppress the urge to steady him because he is too idly, morbidly anticipatory of Hannibal finally finding his limits and falling flat on his face, but Hannibal steadies easily, hand clenched tight around the padlock, the veins of his wrist blue but fading to coppery green tributaries about the tendon, around the scar which Will had Matthew Brown inflict upon him, like vines around a sapling, blood cells depleted of the oxygen which flushes them scarlet as they rush for the heart surely hidden somewhere in Hannibal's chest, a pragmatic sort of treasure.

A stuffy draft flows from the under the half-open door and reaches for Will's skin with soft, probing fingers, stale and humid. He ducks beneath Hannibal's raised arm to gain entrance into the deep shadows within and after a second hears footsteps scuffing behind his own. The air is thick in his respiratory system, dragging wet and musty in his throat and lungs. There is a pervasive, sickly-sweet scent of decay; something small has died in a corner somewhere.

“Electricity?” Will asks.

“And running water. I made sure that despite my absence, there would be secondary measures in place for me should I ever return to the States. I find it best to preserve multiple options.”

“It pays to be prepared,” Will murmurs, and there's no bitterness, despite the usual dose of wryness. He feels empty of any intense emotion, unwilling to commit himself to the effort it would take. He's too fed up to resist anymore, too tired to dig around for some sense of astonishment at his present circumstances, of right and wrong. When one's whole life is a joke things are somehow both more and less funny, meeting at a twisted midpoint of disinterested pliability and passive sarcasm.

“More importantly, I have a suitable range of medical supplies. Let us fix up your cheek and hope it does not scar too horrendously. It would be quite a shame if the Dragon has deformed you, as well.”

“Thanks,” Will says, and stops without saying anything more. Hannibal's presence has always been a palpable thing, and he can feel it presently, pressing, prickling up the line of his back and spreading with frost's creeping feet across the nape of his neck.

He wonders if it is possible that Hannibal is as acutely aware of Will as Will is of him.

He wonders what that would mean.

“You are always welcome, Will.”

* * *

 

Will remembers meeting his relatives, the rather distant collection on his father's side, only once. It was Thanksgiving, the turkey a tremendous, steaming carcass with crispy golden skin he peered in at, turning on the oven light to switch its heated chamber from pitch black to dim illumination which fell upon the hulking shape in its tray like a halo around Christ's bowed lion-maned head in the religious chiaroscuro paintings recreated on their cheap poster-board prints and tacked, unframed, onto the hallway walls. A sacrifice.

There was a group around his age, cousins a couple times removed, whom he was pushed towards. He hovered around the edges and watched their feet so that he would not intercept any curious or suspicious glances and followed in their wake, docile as a sheep.

“Lamb,” they start calling him, when they urge him to keep up. They were all as awkward in their skins as he was, gangly limbs aching with growth spurts, ankles showing bare beneath the hems of their pants and at-home haircuts brushed forwards to hide their soft faces. Acne picked into scabs, like they could burrow their bloody fingertips down into their own flesh, peel themselves away, smiles enlarged by complete sets of adult teeth, voices cracking in slender throats and the smell of their sweat gaining the unpleasant tang and strength of maturity, the scent of their own bodies no longer null enough to hide them from predators which would sniff them out from hiding places in long grass, in the backs of closets. Will was still small for his age, his hair still pretty curly and uncut, and his eyes large. The shortest, the shabbiest.

His father had taken to calling him _scrappy,_ was teaching him how to throw a punch without curling his thumb beneath his fingers and breaking it.

There was a fire pit outside, barbecue coals rippling red and flickering with shy flames, a motley assortment of chairs and stools for the laughing, talking people, but no marshmallows, no hot dogs. All assembled were obliged to fast for the feast which was to come. There was beer aplenty, though, and mostly men with beer guts drinking it, the majority of the women pressed into service in the kitchen. A radio blasting country rock, sour breath and sexist jokes, broad, meaty frames and stifling physicality, gesticulations and back-slapping which seemed to Will to be just short of brutality. His father was happy, though, a brown bottle hanging from a loose hand between spread knees.

Will winced away as the kids went on, timid in the face of so many minds, the unwelcome machismo. He'd found that groups composed more of men to be rougher to traverse and so watched from the sidelines as the other boys stole some alcohol, as the adults decided to allow the infraction slip and let the youngsters hightail it to the edge of the woods in what they thought to be an inconspicuous fashion, knotted together so tightly they almost tripped over each other, running with hands pushing at each others' shoulders and trading harsh, giddy whispers of triumph.

Will lingers, smoke weaving through his hair, before he follows them to their spot behind the woodshed, the unseasoned logs glimmering with spiderwebs. The grass is at the end of its life, browning, patchy, and wet, thinning in places to bare, dead earth and giving way to wood chips and sawdust. Chained near the woodshed there is an old dog with short, scruffy black fur and rangy, arthritic limbs, sprawled stiffly out on its side, its muzzle white with age and a perfect circle of nothing surround it for as far as its chain must reach, everything paced away and packed down into a swathe of space as smooth and hard as concrete. A red-rimmed, cataract-clouded eye is cracked open, watching them warily, a faint growl rumbling in its chest whenever they move.

“Here, Lamb,” someone says, and presses a bottle into Will's hand. It is cold, the glossy label going damp and wrinkling due to the perspiration slicking the sides. The cap has already been cracked off. He takes a swig and scowls at the slimy hint of another person's saliva, the yeastiness of the cheap brew itself. His father has let him sip from his drinks on occasion but Will has never asked to taste, simply waited for it to be offered, if at all. This is the first time he's had enough to possibly get a buzz off of, though. A whole bottle, all to himself. He sets to chugging it almost as fast as the others do theirs and elbows another kid away when they try to get him to share. None of them, after all, really know him; they are not friends and there is therefore no reason to be friendly.

“Hey, watch this,” says one of them, the one who lives here, at the house which is hosting the reunion. He finishes his beer and then chucks the bottle at the dog. It hits the animal's side with a hollow thump, and immediately the dog erupts into a snarling rage, throwing itself to the end of its chain and slavering at them until its dull claws gouge into the dirt and its front paws lift from the ground. It does not bark. Will wonders if that is because it is choking itself, if it does not have enough breath to express its rage. Its fear.

“Stupid, right?” the boy who threw the bottle asks. “He's always been like that. A really stupid mutt. He's dying now. Blind, deaf and dumb, but we don't have the money to put him down at the vet's. We're trying to save on food by letting him live off table scraps until he kicks it. Guess he'll eat pretty damn good tonight.”

“Amen,” another laughs. “Why don't you just kill it yourself?”

“And waste a bullet?” the boy says, pragmatically scornful. “Here, gimme another bottle.”

This one hits a rock at the dog's feet and shatters. Will sees a shard lodge itself between the pads of a restlessly prancing paw, its prints splotched with red like Valentine's Day hearts in the scant dust.

The others begin to make a game of it, throwing the rest of the bottles, and then stones and sticks from the nearby woodpile. It's an ugly sort of cycle, a drunken one-upmanship of daring sadism. The boy who first instigated the violence is growing uneasy beneath his veneer of enthusiasm as more and more visible cuts begin to litter the animal's body, lacerations crisscrossed over its snapping muzzle and its twisted legs shaking beneath it, but he does not tell the others to stop, even helps them circle the dog and takes turns riskily lunging within its reach to snatch at its tail whenever it swivels to go after any of them in particular.

The dog is beginning to lag, a thick, hoarse whine roughening the edges of its panting, its prominent ribs heaving at its sides like a bellows and its dribbling spit going foamy around the yellow stumps of its teeth and pale gums, limping with every step.

Its eyes are white around the edges, within the drooping scarlet of its lids. It's still not barking. By now it seems barely able even to growl.

Will swallows down bile as he finally stands and walks to the woodshed, his head spinning a little but his steps and his heartbeat steady. The others notice one at a time as he approaches, one by one stopping outside of the dog's reach and staring at him, at the ax he's carrying, the smiles falling from their faces as they straighten and quiet. The echo of their malicious glee thrums in his mind, the rank terror running beneath it like a current, like the second piece of a duet, together creating a whole, a masterpiece.

The dog rounds on him, stumbling, legs splayed to keep itself upright, head lowered and hackles raised.

Will shushes it, keeps himself relaxed, eyes lowered, bringing himself to a kneeling position as he breaches the circle of packed dirt and enters the dog's domain. The dog recoils at his slowness, at his steadiness, confusion just keeping it from attacking even as its warning growl starts weakly up again, and Will smiles a little, reassuringly, holding out his free hand in a fist, his thumb not tucked beneath his fingers. So as not to break it, should it come to that. The dog bares more and more of its teeth as Will nears it, shivering, and then goes still as he touches its head, uncurling his hand to stroke gently over its skull, short, oily fur and aged skin slipping over bone as he massages it. The dog's head lowers further under his ministrations, its big, emaciated body following to flatten itself to the ground, the growl sputtering into silence as it succumbs to its exhaustion.

“Shh. There, there,” Will murmurs, absently soothing. “Good boy. Such a good dog.”

The poor old dog is too tired to notice when Will eventually moves his hand away and shifts forward, centering the ax over its head and raising it with both hands so as to put as much strength behind the blow as possible. To make it quick and clean.

The cousins do not look at him the same way, after that, and they do not call him Lamb anymore. They do not call him by name, either. They do not call him anything.

They rush to explain the blood on Will's clothes as the result of a nosebleed, so that the adults do not postpone the holiday dinner in favor of something so drastic as siccing the police on a fledgling killer in their midst. Will stands passively, shock setting in, sobering him, and lets them all babble. Sees the word _freak_ sketched out in the furtive stares, the way they look away when he turns to meet them, the flinches, the quiet which descends when he drifts towards them and the frantic muttering which rises amongst them when he leaves. The splatter of fresh red stains on his sleeves.

Shortly after the prayer he excuses himself from the laden banquet table and waits out the rest of the Thanksgiving meal in the guest bathroom, on his knees, retching into the cool ceramic bowl of the toilet, warm beer lacing the watery, burning acid purged from an empty, cramping stomach. Occasionally he climbs up to cup water from the sink in his hands and wet the back of his neck or splash his face, but then he sinks back down, his own height dizzying and his reflection in the mirror unbearable.

Will and his father spend the night on the creaky fold-out couch, the support bar unforgivably rigid through the thin mattress, putting a crick in Will's spine as he rolls around and around, trying and failing to get comfortable, his limbs like lead and his eyes achingly dry. The house rouses early the next morning to Will's screams, his father groggily shaking him out of his nightmare and telling everyone not to worry, it's not so unusual, Will's young yet and nightmares are to be expected from time to time. Will has not yet learned to keep himself silent as he sleeps; he does thereafter.

Later that week Will knows his father has been informed of the dog's death. Phone call, probably; the landline in the kitchen with its coiled plastic-coated cord, the clatter as it's pulled from its cradle on the wall, above the linoleum counter, off to one side of the new fridge. For a while he hugs Will more often, again, squeezing him tight and crushing his head to his chest as though he can smother whatever it is lurking within his son which scares him, but he never asks Will if he did it and Will never tells him, as that is the way things are.

They are not invited back for Christmas.

* * *

 

Will is floating again as Hannibal stitches his cheek closed, suspended in a haze of medication which takes the pain away. The sensation of the diminutive curve of the surgical needle, gripped delicately in the needle holder as it is driven down to pierce his flesh, is numbed but not banished, the foreign, insistent pull of the stiff synthetic thread running through his cheek tickling more than it stings. The instruments are smooth, slender, and hard, slick with blood and saliva as he presses the plush tissue of his lolling tongue against the alien metal, an inquisitive, voluptuous undulation of muscle, mindlessly probing, heedless of injury. Hannibal's deft hands taste of the nitrile rubber exam gloves sheathing them, a too-stretched, too-flawless second skin. He's holding Will's jaw open, wielding the needle, pushing firm fingers into the slack wet heat of Will's mouth, against his tongue, so as to keep it clear of Hannibal's work.

Through the flickering spangles of his lashes Will can see Hannibal's shape, limned with white fluorescence, beading and warping between Will's blinking as though liquid, a lava lamp in negative, but his hands, his hands are solid and steady against him, and Will rests open and quiescent beneath them as the needle tugs through his numbed cheek, pulling the suture after it and drawing the soft edges of the stab wound flush together. He lies there as Hannibal ties off the stitch, trims the tail with a silver-flash snip of scissor blades, dabs away the blood with a wad of cotton gauze pinched within dainty forceps, the lingering scent of antiseptic whistling sharp in Will's nostrils, and makes no move to push him away, to rise and run.

Hannibal pauses when Will reaches up to loosely circle his wrist, below the glove where his skin is bare and taut, textured and warm with his pulse and bisected lengthwise by the scar, but the touch is light and undemanding and does not interfere with Hannibal's stitching, so he allows Will's hand to remain, and resumes.

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

They move quite a lot throughout Will's childhood.

* * *

 

Will does not anger easily. Anger, after all, is a secondary emotion, a misdirection to fool oneself into believing that one is not hurt, or scared. It is a lie designed to sublimate one's energies outwards. Will, though, does not peddle in falsehoods, and despite the fear which hums in the marrow of his bones, an ache far more ancient than arthritis, something basic and small and inexorably intertwined with the very squalling dawn of the self, he does not let it twist away from him, holds its razor-sharp truth tight to himself, lets it dry him out, shred him into brittle ribbons, and prays that he does not blow away in the breeze before he can snatch the answers he needs from the storm of knives nesting itself a drafty little home in his psyche.

It is still so hard, when he's railroaded into Chilton's zoo of fellow freaks, to admit it to himself. Admit that he may hate, he may be angry, but it is not Hannibal whom he loathes. His anger may be slow to wake, and once it is risen it is implacable, a creeping, heavy burn twining around his heart, but it is also broken as Will is broken, and he cannot bring himself to point it away, holds it like a loaded weapon, and, like an idiot, points that weapon against his own chest. Energies directed inwards.

He does not hate Hannibal. How he wishes he did. Oh, how he wishes.

But then, that's just another bullet in the chamber, isn't it? The muzzle digging into his ribs, his finger on the trigger. At least, unlike his fear, his anger does not make him sweat.

* * *

 

He and Hannibal sleep in the same bed, Will wearing spare black boxers of a nice, slim-cut, silky fabric, identical to Hannibal's; all the clothes stored in the drawers and closet are according to Hannibal's tastes but at least they're dry. Will finds a thick polyethylene package with a white zipper containing sheets, and tucks them over the mattress. There's a blue cotton blanket which was not new, and smells faintly of dust, but he throws it on top anyways. No pillows. Hannibal meticulously pulls a corner of the blanket into a folded pad beneath his head, his arms bent up near his chest, his length curled into a loose fetal _S_ with the broad, battered planes of his bare back angled, unprotected, towards Will, his IV stand set up on his side of the bed.

It is below the base of his gracefully bowed neck that the knobs of his spine press up most sharply through his skin, the procession of vertebrae like a chain of islands; ancient, volcanic. Will imagines running a blade down over them to slice a shallow line, one just deep enough to get his nails into so he can peel the skin away to reveal the spikes of bone hidden mere millimeters beneath; imagines tenderly kissing the pink from each one until they're chalky white, polished, pristine. The bruising from shielding Will from the fall is blooming dark and puffy and plum-purple, overtaking vast tracts of Hannibal's warm brown flesh; it would taste of fruit, of perverted nectar, would yield soft and juicy beneath his teeth and slide sweet and welcoming down his throat, to warm his stomach; a plum, a peach, an apricot, a bull's heart slit to spill a glimmering drop of plasma with every tumescent quiver, swallowed whole. Ambrosia.

There is a carnivorous _need_ to cut Hannibal open and _crawl_ inside and stuff himself with what he finds there, to taste, to _devour._

Will never knew the meaning of... hunger. Before Hannibal. And now after Hannibal, _with_ Hannibal... yes. Yes, he _hungers,_ doesn't he?

With their run-down bodies striped with golden bars of late afternoon light sifting in through the slats of the lowered bedroom blinds, Will watches Hannibal fall asleep, can tell the moment when he slips into unconsciousness because something in Will finally relaxes, goes dark like a candle flame gently extinguishing itself in soft, warm wax, having burnt down to the end of its wick.

* * *

 

He can't turn it off. That's what he thinks people expect of him, why they push and pry and become impatient with his antisocial tendencies, his need for solitude which borders on misanthropy in its aggressiveness. He can enhance his empathy, put himself into a semi-trance and bring the omnipresent traces of outside influences to the forefront of his mind, solidify them until he can divine what the hell they must be, whatever the hell they are, but he's never left truly alone. Never spared.

He avoids the news for all he's worth, long after he moves out and his father no longer stands in front of him, trying to protect him from the world, or the world from him... doesn't matter which. He reads the ripples of tragedy in the surge and swell and breath of everyone around him, all the joys and sorrows which shiver in fractal systems through the whole of society, and it is the sorrow which stays with him. It's true that he can feel anything anyone else does, but there is still some resonance of the familiar which allows same to gravitate towards same, like to like, kin to kin, and Will's basic disposition has never been a particularly cheerful one.

It haunts him, the fact that he is a parasite who cannot help but leech the sting of others' loss. When he is in his early twenties he leaves his father to his tinkering in his Lake Erie boatyard, moves back to Louisiana, to New Orleans, and joins the force. It is as much in self-defense as anything, a selfishness, an exercise in futility. It's not as though one more boy in blue can effect any great change, can alleviate the cruelty which runs rampant from person to person. But there's something screaming inside of him, something which wants desperately to live, and to live in peace. To simply exist. To be free of suffering.

Unfortunately enough, it turns out that being a humble beat cop involves immersing oneself in the most depressing aspects of humanity, wearing oneself down upon a grindstone of tedious monotony and grimy reality, taking on a a crushing workload, stacks of unsolved cold cases, weeping family members, suspects handcuffed to hard plastic chairs, the smell of car exhaust, semen and drug smoke clinging to his clothes. Hopelessness and disappointment.

It's there that he begins mainlining black coffee and aspirin, a permanent migraine throbbing in his temples and a snappishness lying crouched beneath his tongue, perpetually on guard, weighed down. Will wasn't cut out for it. He didn't have a sense of duty or higher calling. No altruism. He was just a cynical self-serving bastard, foolishly trying to make a difference because why the hell not? Because what kind of monster would he be, to have his insights, to feel the things he felt, and not do anything about it? And he was failing.

He goes home each night to his cramped apartment, rips his tie from around his neck like it's a snake strangling him, ignores the blinking light on his answering machine from the only person who cares enough, no, who is _obligated_ to call him every other week, and pours himself a glass of whiskey to dull the pounding in his head. Drinks until he's reasonably sure he can close his eyes and see nothing waiting there for him in the darkness. No more sips of his father's beer for him.

He's a good officer, though. He understands people in a way beyond the imagination of most, can deescalate most situations by murmuring the right things in the right tone of voice, as he spoke to a calm the panic of a decrepit, dying dog, once. He lays his hand flat on the searing heat of a car hood as he bends down to a driver lowering their window, his flesh adhering just short of painfully to sun-baked metal, or slouches uncomfortably against the thickly-painted wood frames of cracked-open doors still secured by the safety chain, the coarse, durable cloth of his uniform rasping against his skin as he shifts in the mugginess, pulls his cap off his sweat-soaked curls more in deference to the urge to scrub his fingers through his hair to air it out than as a sign of respect to whomever he's talking to, and coaxes people into cooperation while his senior partners look on in mingled bemusement, impatience, and approval.

It's fucking exhausting. Forcing himself to make eye contact, to refrain from wrenching his own barriers up to protect the dwindling sanctity of his mind, to keep himself from letting his face crumple into a snarl when he sees their fear, their lies, their anger and their hypocrisy. To get himself to stay, to stand tall and serve them when all he wants is to shrug off the overbearing, ill-fitting mantle of responsibility and retreat into a faraway corner to stew.

The other officers press him into more and more delicate situations the more they notice his capacity for diplomacy, however grudging it may be, and no matter how much he hates his own aptitude or how often he hints at this hatred to his superiors with less and less subtlety. Several weeks in he doesn't finagle himself out of an invitation fast enough and ends up attending an informal officers' poker night.

Bluffs don't work on him.

He fleeces the other players down to a man, scoops up his winnings and shoves them into his pocket without a single grumbled apology before he skulks off into the night, and is never invited back. Petty of him, perhaps, but he's stopped caring about moral niceties long before he learned what “caring” was, and why it seemed to have it out for him.

At least they ease up on assigning him every single surly drunk-and-disorderly after that.

* * *

 

Abigail comes to him that night. He knows it is a dream as he sits across from her, surrounded by a black expanse of nothingness, a small, square folding table of blond wood with a chessboard set up between them. The board and pieces are very fine, detailed, ivory and ebony. They morph to bone and burnt antler, to marble and granite, and back again whenever he is not paying attention, sometimes weathered-keratin rough and repulsive in the way of dead things which are still warm, sometimes entrancingly smooth and cold beneath his fingertips as he traces their insubstantial, malleable forms; frowning bishop, tooth-crowned rook, a knight ridged with a wavy, flaring mane which lengthens as he lingers over it.

The pieces click against the board, solid, then hollow, and he can never tell where they end up when they are moved but he can see Abigail's fingers tapping against the head of her queen with perfect clarity, her hands white and slender, youthful skin marked by hunting callouses and ghostly freckles in shades of cream against snow, the nails bitten down to the red quick, soft and bleached and ragged. She'd never bitten them before. When she was alive. When Hannibal had not yet taken her from both herself and from Will.

 _“You didn't struggle,”_ he says, of that final night when Hannibal had held out his hand for her and she had obeyed, had gone placidly into his arms and presented her neck to his knife.

She smiles at him, the same smile as when he was teaching her fly-fishing in the quiet of his stream, in the golden place in his mind far away from his cell in the BSHCI, echoing with the insanity of its inhabitants and the petty ambitions of its overseers. It is the facsimile of a normal girl's happiness, and its studiously casual artifice, the fact that the closest thing it shares to any of the real Abigail's expressions is its falseness, puts a secret between her eyes and his even as it shares another secret with him and serves to cement the truth of her, makes it so that he cannot help but accept her, unconditionally, in any form she takes.

 _Would you ignore God?_ she asks, and her smile barely so much as flickers when she speaks. _Block your ears to one of His commands? Turn your back on the being who spared you, gave you life, purpose, and recreated you in His image?_

 _“Hannibal's not God,”_ he dismisses gruffly. Bitter. He's said that before, hasn't he? Or was it an assertion not that Hannibal was not God, but that, rather, he was not the Devil?

 _Maybe not,_ she muses, raising one slender brow without looking at him and sliding a pawn forwards, intent upon their match. _But he sure has a way of becoming your everything._

He tips over her bold little pawn with one of his rooks, the smaller figure clattering to the board and then rolling in an arc before Abigail deftly plucks it out of play like a crane spearing a minnow, snatching it up between her index and middle fingers. The scar on the side of her neck slowly draws itself open as though unzipping, the curve of the gash mirroring her faint, enigmatic smile, and blood begins to pour down to her shoulder in a soundless scarlet sheet, soaking into the cobalt blue of her sweater and turning it wine-dark.

She does not seem to notice as she tosses her pawn into the air, her face tilted upwards to watch it fall with feline-bright eyes, pale blue irises almost swallowed by pupils which have in death relaxed into proportionally huge discs of impenetrable blackness, the angle baring her slashed-open throat. She catches the pawn with both hands raised before her, clasping them together as though to contain or to crush it upon landing, a Venus flytrap in sated prayer.

His love for her is a hole where his heart should be. A wound, an absence. Sometimes, because he cannot feel it, he wonders if it is still there... and then he'll see her in the corner of his eye, the motion of her straight, dark hair as it is flicked over the brittle, practiced poise of her narrow, angular shoulders to hang down her back, a night-auburn slash which fans out as it flies before settling once more into a thin, flat fall over her unbowed spine, swaying slightly with steps too silent to hear.

She was so young.

Although he cannot feel her, the loss never leaves him. _She..._ does not leave him. But she is the one phantom whose persistent residence in his mind he has never disputed. Hell, he _invited_ her. A parent will do anything for their child, after all; will do anything to _keep_ them, close, and loved. They would even commit the ultimate sacrifice... at least, as it is in this case... of... remembrance.

Love is sometimes a selfish, funny thing, as are the things one does for love. Garret Jacob Hobbs would only have killed his daughter so he never had to inflict upon her the mortal injury of letting her go and forgetting.

 _Why do you think Hannibal tried to crack open your cranium and eat your brains back in Florence?_ Abigail prods, snide. She moves a knight; one-two forwards, then a skip to the left. Prancing through hopscotch. It lands on a square of black.

Will tells her that he is not Hannibal's child.

_And yet we're all his creations. Monsters in His image, amen._

A boy stands over a dying dog on a Thanksgiving dinner table, laughs: _Amen._

_“I already know. I already know that he loves me.”_

_Then why's your subconscious still trying to tell you something, Dad?_ she asks.

He slides his queen diagonally across the board, kills her knight. She picks up the fallen piece, regards it thoughtfully. When she bites off its equine head her incisors carve grooves into the stump of the neck, slicing through as cleanly as though through soft brie cheese.

Was she always playing white?

 _“We're all... pawns, in his games,”_ Will says.

Abigail laughs at him, the skin around the outside corners of her eyes creasing like bible paper being crumpled, genuine. He recognizes her smile, now. Recognizes it as Hannibal's.

 _I was a pawn, sure,_ she says, her elbows alighting upon the edge of the table, her chin dropping to rest delicately on the heel of one loosely curled hand as the other drifts over the orderly battlefield spread out in miniature before her, a desultory eeny-meeny-miny-moe. _But you? Never. No way. You don't match wits with a chess piece or try to win it. You've always been his opponent_ and _his prize, Will. I was the means to an end, but you were the ultimate end-all, be-all._

She knocks out one of his rooks with her bishop, breaching the loose phalanx of black around his king with her menacing white.

Herman Melville got it right with Ahab's whale. It is not black which is the color of death.

 _Checkmate,_ she says pleasantly, unduly pleased with herself.

He leans across the table to stroke her hair, tugs playfully at the tip of a tendril before releasing her, smiling proudly, aching. _“He loved you, too.”_

Abigail shakes her head, pushing her lips out into a gently mocking moue. _Yeah, but. Not as much as he loved you. Duh. For someone with a lot of empathy it sure took a lot for him to get you to feel his pain, didn't it?_

His king breaks within his tightening fist, bursting like a ripe berry, blood instead of juice oozing hot from between his fingers, paper-thin obsidian shards cutting deep, but it is not his blood.

* * *

 

Will wakes to Hannibal shifting against his back. He's rolled over in the night to press his broader frame against Will's, their skin flush together, sticking with tacky sweat.

Spooning.

Will almost shoves back and elbows Hannibal in the gut just for the principle of the thing, but he stays himself at the soft, faintly whistling snores which puff hot against the nape of his neck, Hannibal's forehead pushed into Will's hair, his arm lax and heavy over Will's hip and his knees tucked snugly against the backs of Will's, their shapes fitting together like puzzle pieces. Beneath the astringent antiseptics and the store-smell of the sheets he still smells of blood, sea salt, and of the lanolin from his sweater, musky and somehow pleasant.

Will hadn't known Hannibal snored, can't even remember having seen him asleep since the time Will walked into a yet unknown, comatose girl's hospital room and found him unconscious upright in a chair with his hand in hers, his head drooped to the side, and it's... endearing; this sign of vulnerability which has reared its trusting head.

The bandage over Hannibal's patched-up gunshot wound chafes against the small of Will's back, and the pulsing pressure of morning wood pushes up against the curve of his ass, the latter of which he ignores. He's shockingly comfortable, or he would be if his bladder wasn't full to bursting and Hannibal wasn't running a temperature so extreme it seems like there's magma in his veins instead of blood, his body radiating the stifling heat of an oven; Will feels as though he's baking in his arms.

He slides away, slowly, careful not to disturb, his flesh peeling damply from Hannibal's as he goes, goosebumps threatening to rise in the sudden, comparative cool of the air and the blood rushing from his aching head as he sits, disorienting him. Hannibal's rangy arm droops from the shoulder without the support Will's presence had granted him, IV tubing trailing from the the plastic-protected port taped at the inside of his elbow, a soft crease pillowed between his pectorals, his chest seeming almost to cave in on itself, as though there's a space within him which only Will can fill. His lips have dried to a vivid, desiccated rose-red, his hair is mussed and plastered tightly to his skull, his complexion worryingly ashen beneath the shining film of moisture which has built up over him, and he does not move except to breathe. Not even a twitch animates his face, his sparse eyelashes fanning out sharp and perfectly still over the dark, veined hollows beneath.

Well, everything makes sense now. Of course he'd be vulnerable. He's passed out sick.

The back of Will's hand garners no response as he places it against Hannibal's brow, nor is there one when he turns his hand over to mold his palm to Hannibal's forehead, holding it there for a time, until his own cold hand warms.

He leaves Hannibal to sleep. Relieves himself, showers, and dresses; the button-up shirt is a tad too large, especially left un-tucked as it is, and his bare feet look sad and pale beneath the neatly rolled-up hems of the dress pants but are quiet against the creaking floor as he makes his way to the kitchen, the absence of dogs' clicking claws trailing behind him on wood floors resounding in the silence. The dim blue of dusk drifting in through the windows is enough that he does not have to turn on any lights as he goes.

He's tempted to anyways, as a child alone in a big house would to reassure themselves, but he can too clearly imagine the light streaming out through the yellowing curtains for anyone to see, has never liked how it makes the windows opaque and reflective for anyone who resides within, looking out, but causes the inside to be lit clear as day for anyone without, looking in. It's too close to being inside an overblown metaphor for his own thought processes. Since Hannibal, everything in his life's been nothing but freaking metaphors and similes and convoluted, pretentiously poetic analogies. It grates a little, that it's managed to rub off onto _him._ Fucking empathy.

That could be his life's motto. Certainly fits.

He finds the canned food in the cupboards, the packaged meat shrink-wrapped and stored in the freezer, the powdered milk and other dry goods with safely far-away expiration dates. Packets of tea in the breadbox.

Kettle. Water. Stove top. It's the kind which lights with the aid of a match, held to the gas; a ring of whooshing blue teeth ignites eagerly at the touch of orange flame. Easy enough. A pair of dust mugs, the crack as the seal on a bottle of detergent is broken. Soap suds, skin wrinkling in hot water as ceramic is washed.

Screech of kettle. Steam as the cups are poured, as the tea bags are dropped in. Earl Grey. Plain.

Ick. No.

Find the sugar, make some milk with the powder. Get sour grains of powdered milk everywhere. Transform one mug of hot leaf water into hot cream-and-sugar water. Leave the other one untampered so as not to upset the food snob.

By the time Will rounds out the presentation by putting the mugs on a tray and garnishing them on the side with the crumpled tea packets he hears Hannibal beginning to stir.

His feet are as quiet walking back into the bedroom as they were going out, but the china clatters a little with every movement, spoons clinking, the tray a little warped, the mugs rocking on the uneven surface.

Hannibal's eyes are open, preternaturally bright as ever, as though he were never asleep. When he sees Will he smiles, slow and sweet as treacle, his intensity dimming as he blinks with a comfortable slowness which belies his exhaustion, the way that cats blink to show trust and affection, and he relaxes back into the mattress with a luxurious stretch, back arching and one heel pressing down into the bed for leverage as he lets the other one slip down, his leg straightening, foot pointing downwards like a ballet dancer's, an angular, almost gawky curve of bone and tendon, en pointe. His ribs expand, straining against his skin as he sighs contentedly, as he idly scratches at the medical tape on his arm. The depleted bag sagging on its stand sways slightly as the IV tubing is tugged.

Will sits mutely, face blank as he sets the tray between them. He doesn't have to smile back. Is at ease enough not to. Instead picks up his tea and slurps at it, one eyebrow raised in invitation as he glances from Hannibal's smirk to the proffered tray and back.

Hannibal slides upright, slow and loose in deference to his gut wound, quirks an eyebrow of his own at the discarded tea packets serving as exceptionally poor decoration.

“Thank you, Will,” he says anyways, picking up his own mug, his elegant hands curling snug around its heat. The more cold-blooded one is, the more, perhaps, one craves such tactile pleasures, the corporeal delights. The more one treasures warmth.

“No problem,” Will mumbles automatically.

Hannibal settles regally against the headboard before sipping delicately at his tea, and then, suddenly and ignominiously, spits the drink out, spraying it in a splattered amber cloud over the bedspread, clipping Will's shocked face with hot speckles of liquid.

 _“Will,”_ Hannibal coughs. He snatches up one of the empty packets, squinting at it in incredulous, exaggerated disgust before sniffing it and recoiling, fixing Will with a plaintive stare of wounded disbelief, holding it out and up, between them. “These tea leaves... they have succumbed to _mold.”_

Will very calmly takes another slurp of his tea, sets his mug down on the tray, and shrugs, deliberately. A fond smirk of his own flits over his lips, and he lets it take hold, lets it reach his eyes, reach that empty hollow inside himself and fill it up with its echo. A song of belonging. Domesticity.

This is love, is it not? This is love.

“Whoops,” he says. “Didn't notice.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
